September 2022 Summaries

Charles Schwab's application modernization journey began with a focus on agility, advancing concepts, driving progress, and bringing products to market. The company's emphasis on addressing client needs led to the adoption of containerized platforms, which enabled quick deployment of workloads across different environments. This, in turn, drove the need for database modernization, as traditional RDBMS databases were not matching the app infrastructure. Charles Schwab discovered distributed SQL by looking for a solution that could scale across zones and regions, handle failure scenarios seamlessly, and provide strong consistency and durability. The company sees distributed SQL fitting into its architecture as a way to bring compute power to its hybrid approach and operate anywhere, with benefits including improved scalability, availability, and data integrity.

This paragraph summarizes the key points of the text: YugabyteDB's YSQL API uses the pg_hint_plan extension in PostgreSQL to tweak query execution plans, which can lead to sub-optimal performance at times. To optimize queries, developers can use "hinting" phrases as comments to influence the planner's execution plan. These phrases can be inserted into a table called "hints" to capture query-related suggestions that the planner should leverage. The "hints" table preserves special characters and whitespace, making it useful for optimizing queries without modifying application code. Developers can also use this feature in their client applications written in languages like Java, adjusting hint phrases based on usage patterns such as Statement API with static constants, PreparedStatement API with bind parameters, or PreparedStatement API with both bind and static constants. By leveraging pg_hint_plan, developers can optimize YSQL query performance without modifying application code.

The Yugabyte University has reached a significant milestone with 10,000 students enrolled in less than a year after its official launch in 2022. The rapid growth reflects the increasing demand for skills to build fast, resilient, and scalable cloud-native applications using distributed SQL and YugabyteDB. The university offers various learning paths, including self-paced courses, virtual instructor-led training, and builder workshops, designed to cater to different skill levels and roles. With a strong community of experts and professionals, YBU inspires students to grow through interactive learning and knowledge sharing, providing no-cost learning opportunities for its open-source community. The university plans to continue evolving and improving the student experience with new courses, workshops, and a career marketplace, creating an online global community of cloud-native application developers and database practitioners.

Azure Databricks is a cloud analytics platform that can export and import data from a YugabyteDB database to supported file formats such as Avro and Parquet, helping developers and data engineers build full end-to-end data analytics workloads. To achieve this, Azure Databricks uses its File System (DBFS) and Data Lake Storage (ADLS), along with Spark clusters that can be auto-scaled based on data requirements. The import process involves reading Parquet or Avro files from DBFS or ADLS into a DataFrame, importing the data into YugabyteDB tables without transformation, and querying the table to confirm the data has been imported. Similarly, the export process involves loading data from YugabyteDB into a DataFrame, exporting it into Parquet or Avro format, and saving it into the Azure Databricks DBFS folder or ADLS. The pre-requisites for this include creating a Spark Cluster in Azure Data bricks and configuring it with necessary PostgreSQL or Yugabyte Cassandra Driver through Maven or other repositories.

The Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) 2022 was a successful online event that brought together nearly 6,000 attendees to discuss distributed SQL and its benefits. The summit provided insights into the future of distributed SQL, highlighting the need for cloud-native databases that can meet increasing scaling, availability, and flexibility requirements. Key takeaways from the event included the limitations of monolithic databases, the importance of preparing data infrastructure for modern applications, and the growing adoption of distributed SQL among enterprises. The event also showcased innovative features in YugabyteDB, including Change Data Capture, data migration engine, and performance advisor tools, which enable businesses to capitalize on cloud-native applications and run business-critical transactional applications effortlessly from anywhere.

To create an alert configuration for YugabyteDB Anywhere, one must first retrieve their Customer UUID, validate the notification channel, and define the alert policies using APIs. The process involves retrieving the customer's UUID, validating the default notification channel, and verifying that the default destination is set for the platform. Next, an alert policy can be created by sending a POST request to the `alert_configurations` API endpoint with the necessary parameters. Finally, the newly-created alert policy can be tested using the `test_alert` API endpoint. By following these steps, users can successfully create and test their own alert configurations for YugabyteDB Anywhere.

The Distributed SQL Summit 2022 is a virtual event that will take place on September 14th, bringing together the distributed SQL community for learning and networking opportunities. The summit aims to help attendees learn about emerging technology trends in database modernization and transformation, with a focus on YugabyteDB as an open-source distributed systems-based approach. Industry thought leaders and forward-thinking enterprises such as Fiserv, Wells Fargo, and Kroger will be participating, sharing their experiences and pain points. The event promises to provide insights into the latest developments in core database technology, security, risk management, geo-distribution, and resilience, with opportunities for attendees to share their own experiences and learn from others.